' L el "Ofcourse you don't lookfat." . I Belzoni, ex-circus strongman, self-taught Egyptophile, and the greatest of the schleppers of the Nile. It was after view- ing some of Belzoni's loot in 1817 that Shelley wrote "Ozymandias," the name the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus used when discussing the largest of the statues at Thebes, which lay in broken pieces before the temple compound. When Belzoni found the bust lying in the sand, he imagined it was "smiling on me at the thought of being taken to En- gland." This is not how Frith felt about the plunder of antiquities. In one of his famous books of photographs, he raged against the "hordes of careless people who throng the British Museum" and "smile thoughtlessly" at the "incongruous quaintness" of the Egyptian antiquities "and, in England, their unintelligible grandeur." Frith was enough of a cultural entrepreneur to know that the spectacular display of rifled Egyptiana had been the making of the public museum in Europe. He would not have pretended to offer his books as either reparation or apolo But he did hope that they would encourage the export of tourists to the Nile rather than the importing of masonry from it. T he crocodile of cultural guilt seldom breaks the placid surface of either ' ong the Nile" or a companion exhibi- tion of startlingly beautiful pictures, "The Pharaoh's Photographer: Harry Burton, Tutankhamun, and the Metropolitan's Egyptian Expedition." The shows docu- 82 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 8, 2001 . ment one of the West's most ingrained cultural obsessions, inherited from the Enlightenment: the itch for lucidity and exposure, and the recoil from obscurity and concealment embodied in, for exam- ple, the veiled costume of Islamic women or the impassivity of ancient Egyptian masks. The smile of Ramses II at Thebes or of the Sphinx at Giza was not the same as the smile of Voltaire, who, pre- dictably; wrote off classical Egypt as in- stitutionalized cruelty protected by in- fantile superstition. The optimistic mate- rialists of the Enlightenment had little patience with enigmas. Freemaso in- tensely popular in the eighteenth cen- tury; had inherited :&om earlier pseudo Egyptology a fascination with pyramids and hieroglyphs, but it defanged the oc- cult into something harmless enough to go on the back of the great seal of the sunny-side-up American republic. Very few of the early Egyptomanes under- stood or sympathized with the place of deep shadow in Egypt. The mission of most of those making the trip to the Nile-from Herodotus to Harry Bur- ton-was, in the habitual phrase of the scholars, to "throw light" on the impene- trable darkness of the tombs, something the English Burton learned how to do by taking a trip to Hollywood to study floods and spots when he documented the Tutankhamun dig in the nineteen- twenties. The very idea of so much sub- lime skill, intensive labor, and untold wealth being lavished on art expressly designed to be invisible affronted the deepest assumptions of West em aesthetes, presupposing, as they did, the pleasure of displa Rising to the challenge, Eu- ropean Egyptologists became crypt- breakers, in the double sense of tomb penetration and the decoding of glyphs. They were not the first to break and enter. When the archeologists and drafts- men shipped in along with Napoleon's army got into the tombs at Thebes, they found that most of them had long since been emptied of treasures by generations of raiders, going back to the time of the Pharaohs. The scholars and artists who, once a steam passage was open to Alexan- dria, arrived in increasing numbers from the eighteen-thirties to the eighteen- fifties saw themselves as the protectors of antiquities from local pashas with no scruples about hauling off ancient stones to build sugar refineries. The real "Egypt," deemed a common property of mankind, needed rescuing :&om the natives. It was no accident, then, that the most photogenic temples--at Dendera and Philae-were Ptolemaic, dating from only two or three centuries before Christ: the product of a Hellenic- Egyptian cultural fusion. In 1799, pursuing the Mamluk army of Mu- rad Bey all the way to the first cataract of the Nile, General Desaix carved into the face of Trajan's kiosk at Philae an in- scription celebrating the victories of the army of the Republic. Half a century later, as another Napoleonic empire was being created, Félix Teynard, in one of the most dazzling of the photographs in ' ong the Nile," took care to illumi- nate-and thus glorify-the French graffiti in a blaze of raking sunlight, while other walls remain masked by a shadow. Patriotic grandstanding aside, Tey- nard set great store by the cameràs resis- tance to romance. In the spirit of Fox Talbot's manifesto for photography; "The Pencil of Nature," the photographers of the mid-century saw themselves as tech- nicians of truth, light-years ahead of the draftsmen who had created the classic, multi-volume "Description de l'Égypte," which was published between 1809 and 1828. Egyptologists sent from Paris, Ber- lin, and London had begun using a cam- era lucida-a prismatic lens reflecting an image-to make more accurate tracings. Shortly after Louis Daguerre succeeded in fixing an image on a silver-coated cop- per plate, the "Excursions Daguérriennes"